Why I can't have nice things

I know, three posts in one day, but I really need your opinion on this new layout.

Okay, here's the thing. There was that post about Keyes and his denial of Obama's African-American heritage. Then there was my more juvenile post about how nothing ain't fun no more.

The former being infinitely more important than the latter, I didn't want it buried under my own narcissism. So I used a little blogger-sanctioned hack and made these little previews that expand when clicked on.

But I don't know if I like them. They don't seem to render correctly and they make things look a little busch league. What do you think? Take the poll to the right.

PLEASE COMMENT WITH SUGGESTIONS ETC.

Thanks.

Read the full thing here.

Life of diminishing returns

This has been a long time in the writing. I’ve been feeling unsatisfied with everything I read, watch and play. Everything. It’s been a year maybe since something—--TV, Cinema, Books, whatever--—seized me, sat me down, and oozed truth into my various skull-holes.

Like everything else I've ever said, that'’s not entirely true. Sopranos Season 4 on DVD. The DVD part is essential. Wake up early, eat breakfast, stay in your jammy-jams, send the kids to the neighbor’s, turn off the phone, empty your bladder entirely and allot the adjoining 13 hours to maybe the most brilliant television writing ever. Lock the door.

So there’s my first caveat: I’m unsatisfied with absolutely everything--—except that one thing.

Here’s what brought this to a head. In the last week, I’ve consumed three works--composed in various media--each created by a person I consider to be a genius. Each person has a track record of repeatedly and consistently impressing me .

As I battled my way through each new work though, a book, a movie and a video game, respectively, it became obvious that each was going to be a patent disappointment.

I can't decide if this is some kind of freak coincidence, that so many people I admire would simultaneously succumb to Kevin Spacey syndrome, or if the problem is me.

I guess I'll let you decide, beginning with the least banal, so as to ramp up your emotional investment so you don't bail once I start in on the trivial crap.

Exhibit the First: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

A full three years ago my friend gave me Naked, a collection of autobiographical essays. Pressing the volume to my chest, he looked me deep in the eyes, “"Read it, dude."” I went to my room and parked myself in my recliner sometime in the evening. I didn’t move until 5 the next morning.

That is, I didn’t leave the chair. I certainly moved. My body was almost constantly wracked with convulsive fits. My mouth open, a pained expression on my face, very little noise coming out. The laughter tore the air from my lungs. With my head tilted back, some occasional ack, ack, acking escaped over my vocal chords. My jaw opened and closed like a baby sparrow after its mother'’s regurgitate.

If you ever see a redheaded kid clutching a book in the throws of what looks like a grand mal seizure, it’'s more than likely not me, but you’ll get some idea of what I looked like that night.

You read David Sedaris and you'’re sore the next day.

This event repeated itself two more times in the next year. I read Barrel Fever that summer. I found Me Talk Pretty One Day tucked amongst all the trivial crap they line airport bookstores with. I immediately put The Subterraneans on hold. One of the more important things I learned in college: Jack Kerouac has nothing on David Sedaris.

I barely noticed when the flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt turned back because of a blown engine. This was September 17^th, 2001. Forceful.

I don’t think, though, that Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a David Sedaris book. It’s more like a David Sedaris outline. It’s full of ideas and asides that might become wonderful stories, but remain, by themselves, underdeveloped and mostly unsatisfying.

In the collection's symbolic climax, the Rooster makes a triumphant return that approximates the greatness of his first story. But, as they say, one redneck black sheep of a brother does not a memoir make.

Exhibit Two: Intimate Strangers

I admit, I'm not as familiar with this filmmaker, but Patrice Leconte rocked my world last year. The Man on the Train was the most forceful character portrait I’ve seen in a long time. It was for sure in my top ten last year—and probably would have made my top ten of the last two or three years combined.

Despite my ignorance of his larger body of work, Leconte fits because Intimate Strangers is similar to The Man on the Train in essential ways. Both are intensely voyeuristic and obsessed with discovering personal truth through unraveling the mysteries of other people's lives.

Aspects of the film are brilliant. Leconte coaxes a transcendent performance out of Fabrice Luchini, a guy I've never seen onscreen before. He plays the straight man with wide-eyed abandon. He's great.

The story as a whole keeps with the strange bed fellows theme Leconte delights in. It just feels more contrived, I don't know if I can explain it better than that. The payoff is less satisfying and Leconte can't achieve the same level of visual symbolism because, I think, there just isn't as much to work with.

Exhibit Three: Doom III

I like games. In 8^th grade, Doom II was my baphometic fire baptism into the world of computer gaming. It was revelatory. I was changed. I was not the same.

John Carmack created it. He is the godhead behind some of the tightest games in history, and is responsible for almost every significant leap in 3D engines, starting with, I guess, Wolfenstein (also a seminal moment in my life) in the early nineties. He’'s big time.

Doom III though--—the culmination of like four years of work by Carmack and company—--was summed up perfectly by my friend Tas, "“it makes 1 level last an entire game".” It's repetitive and exhausting. The load times are ridiculous. The game functions as much as a test of my patience as it does a test of my demon-killing skills.

It looks pretty though.

Conclusion

I don’t know if there is one.

Does the inevitable loss of novelty that comes from making your way through life mean that nothing will ever be as shocking and amazing as it was when you were younger? Once you digest something, will everything afterward inevitably lose some of the edge it might have had if you'd seen it earlier? Do the new things in life become ever more unsatisfying?

I think my reflection on this subject began in July, when I watched a movie, and inevitably began comparing my life to it. Is there a connection between one's passion and the amount of novelty one feels? They seem to at least run parallel in my life.

My interest in Philosophy has waned steadily with each work I've read. There's a futility to the whole program. That was certainly the case in my abortive career as a Computer Science major. Semesters one and two were pretty tight. A sharp decline in interest ensued.

This makes the prospects for my next 60 odd years seem a bit dubious.

One bit of philosophical minutiae I've clung to, though, is the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. My professor, Dr Liu, described it as feeling as though you have no head, but that each moment brings a feeling of explosive and instantaneous newness as you continually rediscover the world around you.

To put it into more contemporary terms, it's like watching the fourth season of the Sopranos on DVD for the first time forever.

That, apparently, is true peace, and "that's why Buddhists are always smiling," Dr. Liu would say, through his giant grin.

Break me off a piece of that.

Come for my selfish complaining, stay for something really important.

Read the full thing here.

No Kaffir Boys Allowed

I'm going to be posting another blog in like 15 minutes, but this is too infuriating to let slip. From the NY Times (reg req as usual):

'African-American' Becomes a Term for Debate

"I said, 'But I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?' " said Mr. Kamus, who is an advocate for African immigrants here, recalling his sense of bewilderment. "They said 'No, no, no, not you.' "

"The census is claiming me as an African-American," said Mr. Kamus, 47, who has lived in this country for 20 years. "If I walk down the streets, white people see me as an African-American. Yet African-Americans are saying, 'You are not one of us.' So I ask myself, in this country, how do I define myself?"

***

This month, the debate spilled into public view when Alan Keyes, the black Republican challenger for the Senate seat in Illinois, questioned whether Mr. Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, should claim an African-American identity.

"Barack Obama claims an African-American heritage," Mr. Keyes said on the ABC program "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. "Barack Obama and I have the same race - that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage."

"My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country," Mr. Keyes said. "My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage."

Some black Americans argue that black immigrants, like Mr. Kamus, and the children of immigrants, like Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell, are most certainly African-American. (Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell often use that term when describing themselves.) Yet some immigrants and their children prefer to be called African or Nigerian-American or Jamaican-American, depending on their countries of origin. Other people prefer the term black, which seems to include everyone, regardless of nationality.

So the Black descendents of Caribbean slaves, who have since fled further strife in their countries to come to America and who have fought to become citizens of this country have somehow not been "shaped by [their] struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage"?

Now, it seems, African-American is not just an Ethno-Cultural distinction, it's a statement of how many lashes your great-great-grandfather/mother bore on his/her back--as well as on what continent he/she received them.

My God.

How many generations does it take to be considered an American? Does living in the Caribbean somehow strip you of African status in a way that living in America does not? What country should someone be born in that they can claim slave heritage? Is having descended from people who were torn from their homes and bound in irons and sent to work as animals thousands of miles from their home somehow not enough? Do whips hurt less in Jamaica? Does the beautiful scenery somehow mitigate suffering?

Is this the new classism in America? We've become too equal, so exclusionists have to split these kinds of hairs to set themselves apart?

This string of questions isn't some kind of Socratic literary conceit, I just . . . don't . . . get it.

Short Bio of Alan Keyes

Italy to Cornell to Harvard, what a hellish existence he's had burned into him. My mom was a military brat, does that make her like 1/4 African American? Of course not, Keyes still has a race card to play--but only when it suits him.

I guarantee Abdulaziz Kamus, the Ethiopian-born activist from the beginning of the Times story, has had to overcome more personal hardship than Mr. Keyes.

Then this:

Keyes defended the [Reagan] administration's policy against imposing economic sanctions on South Africa, a position that brought frequent criticism from black leaders.

So somewhere, whilst being "shaped by [his] struggle", Keyes came to support apartheid, or at least oppose the sanctions that could have helped end it. Was he worried about the impact of sanctions upon the disenfranchised black Africans? If so, then why doesn't he welcome these same refugees into the larger fold of African-American brotherhood? The hipocrisy is deep.

This is the new face of Xenophobia I think. This is the new front in the war against them--the war against everyone else. Not even Americans of recent African decent are allowed into the African-American clubhouse. They haven't suffered through enough left-wing battery at Cornell.

If a great white Satan like myself can be maddened by this, where are the black leaders who actually fought for equal rights? They've gotta set these people straight.

Where is Al Sharpton when you need him? Though his great-great-grandparents were probably slaves--American slaves--so I shouldn't assume he's with me on this.

It's good the two parties can share a talking point: that refugees from impoverished and war-ravaged nations haven't suffered enough to consider themselves African-Americans.

This isn't progress.

Why does no one listen to Goethe?

Read the full thing here.

Metamorphosis

I've always speculated that my job had an adverse affect on how I look and feel. Most would wager, and I would normally agree, that it's a psychological thing--the daily grind mentality taking its toll. Lately though, I have begun to suspect our office's power grid is dependent on the vital force of recent college graduates--their enthusiasm and idealism mostly--to keep everything whizzing and humming. As I walk in the door daily, the halogen lamps overhead brighten. The ambient buzz gains pitch and my feet begin to drag a bit. I walk a little slower. I think my job feeds off me.

All of this was conjecture, of course, until today.

With absolutely no forethought, I stumbled upon something shocking. Let's compare pictures I took trying to decide if I like my new haircut. I couldn't plan this sort of thing if I wanted to; my face normally isn't this pliable. Prepare to witness routine vanity exposing soul-deep truths.

First, from my apartment, this morning:

Note the contented look on my face, bathed in soft, warm light as though I'd just been given a big hug by God himself. The camera naturally swaddles me in beauty blur, as though the shot was taken through a jar of Vaseline. I'm a happy little scamp.

But then, only twenty minutes later:

I look like I've been chasing Quaaludes with kicks to the face. I am the first to arrive but the office is already abuzz with conspiratorial electric hums. I cross the threshold and become Philip Seymour Hoffman. Gaunt, sallow--bedecked with freckles.

Granted, I've always had freckles.

I'll leave you to judge for yourselves, but implore you to remain vigilant against what you have seen.

I'll end this with an apology for not blogging about anything of consequence since, well, ever. Has it been that long? After some gentle nudging from Ben (who has just distilled complaint lit to its essence), I'm going to get to work on the half-dozen or so serious blogs I've been kicking around.

In my defense, they're difficult to start and harder to finish.

In the meantime, here's one for the ladies.

Kafka is doing a tumbling routine in his grave.

Read the full thing here.

The imperfectability of internet intelligence

This is funny. I accidentally typed the blog's URL into the Google bar rather than the address bar.

One of the strings that came up was this site: All Consuming. I can't believe I didn't find this earlier, considering how obsessive I am.

Its mission statement:

All Consuming is a website that visits recently updated weblogs every hour, checking them for links to books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Sense, and other book sites. Every book on this site has a list of all the weblogs that have mentioned it, and every weblog that has mentioned books in the past also has a page here listing which books it has mentioned. If you have a weblog, search for it here to see if we've picked anything up from it yet.

Good idea, poor execution.

It turns out nine books I've discussed have found their way into the annals of allconsuming.net. NINE. I guess I talk books more than I thought. I know, however, that I've never written a proper review.

As it turns out, I mostly mention books I've never read. They come up in passing, or as part of a longer tirade that has nothing to do with the books themselves.

Example: The graphic novel Watchmen. My statement, regarding Darren Aronofsky's next movie: "An adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen (a favorite of my friend Ben, I've never read it)"

I have to conclude that no human being has ever seen the blogs this site's crawler flags.

I call Breakfast of Champions "the best book ever" as part of a larger invective about my life.

The closest thing I have to a REAL review was my discussion of Robert Sapolski's two books, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and A Primate's Memoir. That post isn't on All Consuming anymore because links get deleted after a month. A Google cache is all that remains of books I actually had opinions of.

Here is All Consuming's page for my blog, highlighting the absurdity of this system.

I think the idea is solid, and the site could work. But it needs a liberal dose of human scrutiny--a little nudging from its flesh and blood handlers. To be fair, I know they're not just looking for reviews. I think people might genuinely be interested that Aronofsky is adapting Watchmen for a movie. I know I was.

But the posts in which I only reference Vonnegut books to brag about how well read I am should be culled. Honestly, they should be stricken from this blog as well.

So let it be written; So let it be done.

All Consuming has the potential to become a magnificent tree of knowledge and opinion--the editors just need to do some pruning.

It occurs to me that, since I just quoted a previous blog that had a link back to Amazon, AllConsuming.net's all-seeing blog crawler will flag this post as well, posting not a rumination on Watchmen, but a criticism of the site itself. This is funny.

Read the full thing here.

Case in point

Personal Update: I couldn't stop thinking about this story all night. I never thought I could have an ounce of compassion for Dick Cheney. Now I think I like him more than Bush. Why? He seems to actually have a shred of the "compassionate conservative" that Bush said they were dripping with. I don't want to like him. I did everything I could to fight it. When I read this article I felt like I was looking down over Whoville as the children awoke and found their presents gone. The camera zoomed in on my heart, and it broke. I can't look at Cheney as a soulless Halliburton Mitochondrion anymore. This really muddies the waters of personal opinion, but not enough to vote for him.

This is what happens when you realize that someone you love--someone whom you would give your life for--has been consciously and systematically oppressed his or her entire life.

When you see the anguish that person has faced, you start to oppose the oppression. It doesn't matter how high in the government you are or how far your resistance places you from the party line. Suddenly that nameless and distant pain is foremost in your mind and it has a face you adore.

If everyone in America had a gay son or daughter, there would never have been a gay marriage issue. The same would have been true in the 60's. Rights for African Americans would have come much sooner if segregation wasn't so pronounced.

This is what I've been talking about. Xenophobia--Fear of outsiders, the other--is most easily broken down in close quarters. By keeping other people and other cultures at bay, we only ramp up the hatred, the ignorance, and the intolerance. Once again I point to my man Goethe.

He's in it for the Quiche.

Read the full thing here.

This is bad

Double plane crash over Russia. Posted 20 minutes ago. Mike, you know the probability of two planes crashing within 3 minutes of each other?

I'm guessing the odds are much higher when terrorists are aboard . . .

Who would have done this? Does Russia have troops in Iraq? If it turns out to be terrorism, I'm thinking it's probably Chechens.

Anyone have thoughts on this? Who else hates Russia?

UPDATE: Hmmm, the Herald-Sun is the only place I could find that doesn't quote Reuters. Their correspondents in Russia say the Russian Tass news agency is putting the number of people on board at 62 and 54 respectively

UPDATE MK II: From some Canadian Radio Station or something:

The plane that crashed was headed to the southern city of Volgograd, while the plane that disappeared was flying to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, where President Vladimir Putin is vacationing, ITAR-Tass reported.

Read the full thing here.

Daily Goethe Sound Bite

"Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one."

Good advice for incumbents, challengers . . . organizations grouped under a certain 3 digit string of numbers.

I just discovered Wikiquote, thanks to someone else who just discovered it. You guys are in trouble.

Read the full thing here.

Daddy?

Momma Hamm has some 'splaining to do.

Read the full thing here.

If you squint real hard . . .

UPDATE 8/24: Here is an interesting article (reg. req.) focusing on the Manchurian Candidate as an example of how the left is fighting back against the Right's war of fear by shifting that fear from Al Qaeda to Big Brother. Thanks to Peter from Polistyrene for pointing it out.

I'm working on a comparative blog on the Manchurian Candidate, new and old. This will be fun. Unfortunately I'm going to have to watch the original again to refresh my memory.

At any rate, I strongly endorse Jonathan Demme's remake, even though his direction is uninspired.

Between the 20 minutes of commercials Regal Cinemas has spliced in to offset their staggering losses and the feature itself, I saw the trailer for Alexander for the first time. This is the new Oliver Stone epic based on the "life" of Alexander the Great. I don't know what to think. Colin Ferrell looks a little clunky in the role, and his flowing platinum mullet makes him look like a Grade-A yutz--a veritable maroon.

Maybe I should brush up on my Greek history--file through some daguerreotypes from the Pelopponesian Wars--but none of the Greek statues I've ever seen had mullets.

The only mullet I saw on a Greek was affixed to the head of the angry youth who sold me the roughly 8 gallons of Ouzo it took to keep me from committing suicide in Athens. I was supposed to fly out the morning after the place was rocked by the first snow storm the Eastern Mediterranean since the mid-80s. 12 people in Tukey died of exposure that night--this is how unprepared the region is for an inch and a half of snow. It only lasted about 6 hours, then it was gone. The Athens airport was closed for 5 days.

The city itself is post-apocalyptic in the most boring way imaginable. It looks like Sarajevo with less color and more Communist-Bloc architecture. Of course the Greeks don't have the same excuse the Bosnians do for a metropolis of crumbling buildings and infrastructure.

It's just not that cool of a city to begin with, and everything worth seeing is spread over miles and miles of dirty urban sprawl that might be accessible if 70% of the subway stations weren't boarded up (the decades old system was only made fully functional in time for this year's Olympics). It was a dark time boy.

Wow, my digressions are getting worse.

Anyway, I'm not holding out much hope for a historical account--In fact I'm looking forward to seeing what Stone cooks up. His ideas might be running a little thin though. In the a climactic battle towards the end of the trailer, I definitely think I saw a second spearman on a hill just in front and to the right of the rest of the battle.

Then there's the quizzical second-billing of Tommy Lee Jones as Alexander's gay, b-girl consigliere, Clayzakos Shawpides.

Argh, Blogger is sending me my comment emails 12 hours late . . .

Read the full thing here.

Another look at the numbers

Kerry has a very slim lead in the polls at the moment. History teaches that there's usually a momentum shift after each convention, which means the polls are only going to get tighter. But the popular vote, we remember, means exactly nothing in determining who carries the presidency.

With this in mind, and sick to death of the Olympics and Swiftboat politics, I went to look for electoral projections. They're not very easy to find, probably because it's still early in the yeah. Further, nothing I found can exactly be called unbiased and I only found one page that wasn't part of a larger partisan blog or site. Still, the conclusions were pretty uniform.

Counts in red are from right-leaning site, blue skews left. Black sites seem neutral. 270 votes are needed to carry the election.

Kerry Wins 255-178 (316-202 toss-up incl.)
Kerry Leads 203-183 (152 toss-up)
Kerry Wins 327-211
Kerry Wins 286-233

It's strange those margins would be so wide. Misunderestimated, a left-leaning blog, offers an explanation:

most of the states Bush has are states that he's holding on to very strongly. He's "strong" in all of them. I think whats going on is that, by adopting such a conservative agenda, Bush is bringing out lots of new voters. Problem is: he's bringing these votes out in the conservative strongholds. He's doing nothing but strengthening and solidifying his base, which can be a good thing for fundraising and campaigning but when it comes to the vote and when it comes to the electoral college, that won't help him.

This seems like some excellent reasoning, especially after seeing a state-by-state breakdown in voting margin. It's also in keeping with my thoughts on the Republican push to polarize the discourse and the tendency of the Bush campaign to take credit for things only a complete idiot (read: a kneejerk zealot) would believe he had a hand in.

Bush has some huge leads in some really sparsely populated areas, and remember that winning a state by 80% gets you the same amount of electoral votes as if you win that state 51%-49%

The only major state Bush owns handily is Texas, which, you'll remember, we're not supposed to mess with--so that's understandable.

Rather than a frightening exclusionist mindset, the Texas DOT insists the slogan is simply part of a Waste Management effort. I guess that depends on how you categorize Mexicans, socialists and the ACLU.

That would make Manifest Destiny a community outreach program. Let's see if we can do a little image work on the trail of tears--maybe make it a low-income housing initiative. I digress.

There are still a handfull of big states up for grabs, Kerry holds California and Florida by less than 5 percentage points. Bush is ahead in Virginia and Ohio by a similarly slim margin. That's a lot of votes that can swing. I'd like to think if any shift happens, it won't be because of the issue-clouding bullshit being spewed by the 527's on both sides.

That may be naive of me.

Here's an interesting graph of the electoral breakdown since March. There is a huge swing in April that leads me to question the early numbers in that graph, but who knows. I can't think of anything that could have happened then to perpetuate that.

"The US in red and Cuba, through the net in blue, two countries separated by only ninety miles of ocean, but a world of ideologies." Shut the hell up. NBC: worst . . . commentators . . . EVER.

Read the full thing here.

Editor of conservative rag backs Kerry's story

William Rood, a metro editor for the perenially conservative Chicago Tribune, broke his silence and corroborrated Kerry's (and the official documented) version of the firefight that won him the silver star.

"The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there," --William Rood

Strong stuff. Thanks to the Tribune for their impariality and integrity.

Complete story here (annoyingly and intrusively in depth registration required)

Read the full thing here.